Forban is a kind of p2p (peer2peer) filesharing application for link-local and local area network. Forban works independently from Internet and use only the local area capabilities to announce, discover, search or share files. Forban relies on HTTP and he is opportunistic (meaning replicating any files seen in his proximity or interest). The name took his origins from the old French word (a forban is a kind of pirate). “Forban” can be also a play word in English at a time where government or corporate want to ban access to the Internet.

Forban operates in different modes, the opportunistic mode is the default and working as a gossip protocol/epidemic protocol to disseminate data with any Forban in his proximity. The main concept is to provide persistence for the disseminated data even on periodic or unreliable communication (e.g. mobile device willing to exchange files or rural area where intermittent computer devices are passing by).

Development and git repository

Download release and software requirements

You'll just need Python installed (at least version 2.5) to run Forban.
Forban should work on any decent version of GNU/Linux or MacOS. Forban works out-of-box on the OLPC XO-1 and Nokia N900 (with Python installed).
Forban should also run on Windows (less tested and known to be buggy on the proprietary platform) with Python 2.5, 2.6 or 2.7 and the win32api extensions.

As Forban is under active development, we recommend to clone the git repository.

git clone git://github.com/adulau/Forban.git

Install

The easiest is to download the release or git clone the repository.
The setup is quite easy :

P2P Donation

If you like Forban, you can still give some bitcoins money to my bitcoin account : 13Q8TCJqLQ8tfL7rhoa16PmgQrBTjkZ26i
You might ask why giving it to bitcoin, the idea is to promote another free P2P technology.